Financial services marketers can’t bank on regular demand- and supply-side platforms to find the prospects they’re looking for.
The data just isn’t there, said Phillip Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Even Financial, an ad tech provider for financial marketers.
On Tuesday, the company added a programmatic marketplace offering to its existing supply-side API to help connect app owners and financial institutions with specific targeting needs.
Besides the burden of navigating a complex thicket of state and federal regulations, purveyors of credit card offers, personal loans, specific mortgage rates and other personal financial products are wasting media from the get-go if they aren’t targeting consumers who have been pre-approved to take advantage of their particular deals.
“In the personal lending space, there are a lot of financial services companies offering very targeted, almost niche products for very specific slivers of the consumer population,” Rosen said. “Blindly advertising to everybody just doesn’t work.”
Even Financial sources offers for its publisher partners, which include Credit.com and Penny Hoarder, via direct relationships and integrations with financial services companies and alternative lenders like Prosper, Lending Club and Bankrate.
The platform also pulls in third-party data related to what people are in the market for based on past purchases, educated guesses about their financial condition and other cues, like whether they’ve ever applied for a loan or if they recently bought a house.
Rather than paying on a cost-per-click basis, Even Financial’s programmatic marketplace operates on a real-time pricing model that rewards publishers at the top of the funnel when offers are served to pre-approved consumers.
Even Financial only serves ads to consumers its predictive algorithm is confident will convert down the line.
Financial advertisers aren’t fond of CPC, because clicking on an ad doesn’t display enough intent for financial products, which can have long conversion funnels. Paying out earlier also helps publishers because they don’t have to wait for some potentially faraway conversion event like a funded loan or a completed credit card application.
It’s a payment system that appeals to Sam Yount, former CMO of LendingTree, who has been testing Even Financial to monetize Personal Loan Pro, a lead-gen site he launched in July that aims to help consumers compare lending partners based on their need, income and education level.
Real-time pricing enables “a transference of risk,” Yount said.
“Rather than getting paid on something flat like clicks, I get paid for sending good traffic with high-intent customers that match the profile of people that lenders are looking for,” Yount said.
As a small site that’s just starting out, Personal Loan Pro isn’t a big lead-gen driver just yet, which is where Even’s data comes in handy.
“They aggregate data across a lot of partners and that lets me have a more robust data set,” Yount said. “I may never have seen a customer that looks a certain way before, but Even has probably seen many, and that helps.”
Personal Loan Pro also relies on Even Financial to handle regulatory compliance. Even maintains a suite of tools that programmatically monitors regulatory environments across different states to ensure the requirements are being met.
“It’s not that it’s impossible for me to monitor all of that by myself, but it’s a huge amount of work to make sure you’re compliant,” Yount said. “Having someone else take care of it saves me a huge amount of time so I can work on my product.”
